Mystery gibbon found buried in tomb of ancient Chinese royalty

Around 2200 years ago, one of the most powerful women in China’s history was laid to rest in her tomb.

Lady Xia was the grandmother of the first emperor of China, Qin Shihuang, famous for the terracotta army that guarded his grave. Turns out Lady Xia also had something rather special guarding her in death: a previously unknown species of gibbon that was probably her pet.

Lady Xia’s tomb in modern-day Shaanxi, the second largest in China, was excavated in 2004. Inside, the partial facial bone and lower mandible of an ape was found. Now, analysis of the bones has revealed it to be an entirely new species.

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“Gibbons are known to have been kept as high-status pets in China since at least the Zhou Dynasty from 1046 to 256 BC,” says Sam Turvey of the Institute of Zoology in London, and head of the team that identified the new ape and named it Junzi imperialis.

The facial bone included upper teeth including two large canines, the nose cavity and part of the eye socket and forehead. The accompanying mandible also included teeth.

Enough detail remained for distinctive landmarks in the cranial bone and teeth to be compared with corresponding landmarks from datasets of hundreds of present-day gibbons. The comparisons revealed Junzi was both a new species, and a new genus, or family, separate from the four known surviving gibbon families.

Turvey’s team thinks the new gibbon evolved locally, as the tomb also contained remains of other animals native to the Shaanxi region of central China, including a leopard, a black bear and a crane, among others.

No gibbons have been sighted in the area for at least 300 years. The closest existing populations of gibbon in China are at least 1200 kilometres southwest, separated by impassable rivers.

“Until the discovery and description of Junzi imperialis, it was thought that apes and most other primates have been relatively resilient to past human pressures, and that the decline of apes was a modern-day phenomenon,” says Turvey.

“We’re now realising there may also have been numerous past human-caused extinctions of apes and other primates before the recent historical era,” he says.

“This is a warning, another piece of evidence we’ve impacted and caused the loss of species well before the last 200 years,” says Susan Cheyne of the University of Kent.